Newsflash, Harriet. If you showed an ounce of spine in challenging the sort of vacillating, self-interested equivocation that allows an Oldham by-election to be fought in campaign rallies where women sit off to one side – because it’s cultural discrimination, so that’s OK apparently – then perhaps a few women would take you more seriously when you try and pitch yourself as actually giving a shit about women’s rights. But the Left doesn’t give a shit about women’s rights. This fact is well documented. Like all other types of minority rights, the Left is only interested in women’s rights insofar as they can be used as a platform for virtue-signalling and painting the opposition as nasty antediluvian bigots. But when it comes to actually making difficult decisions, involving actual moral principles rather than a wet sort of relativism allied to a ruthless craving for power, what do we see?

Sit over there, sisters, and welcome to the new champions of tolerance and gender equality.

Cressida Heyes for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses the retreat of radical left politics into the American academy as a possible motivator for its focus on identity rather than class issues.

When the Berlin Wall fell, any serious ambitions by Marxists in the West for the realisation of their communist dream in Europe fell with it. Many commentators rather short-sightedly declared that Marxism was dead and social democracy had decisively won. They were wrong, as Nick Cohen argued recently.

Defeated on the political field, Marxian critiques of ideology, power and empire retrenched in the academy, becoming the dominant mode of thought within humanities subjects from literature through history to the many flavours of cultural studies that have spawned today’s corrosive identity politics. Within that comfortably insulated environment, funded academics could critique the hegemonic power of capitalism even as they sucked at its teat.

This worldview sees capitalism as the enemy, pitting groups against one another and spreading insidious lies through the status quo in order to gull the lumpenproletariat into meekly accepting its pyramid of oppression. Shorn by the fall of Soviet Communism of the prime source of opposition to this cancerous social Ponzi scheme, adherents of the Marxian mindset have found themselves allied with any regime or ideology that offers any critique of the horrors of capitalism. The resulting coalition is, as Cohen observes, paradoxical to say the least:

Opposition to the West is the first, last and only foreign policy priority of many on the Left. It accounts for its disorientating alliances with movements any 20th-century socialist would have no trouble in labelling as extreme right-wing.

Not just Corbyn and his supporters but much of the liberal Left announce their political correctness and seize on the smallest sexist or racist “gaffe” of their opponents. Without pausing for breath, they move on to defend radical Islamist movements which believe in the subjugation of women and the murder of homosexuals. They will denounce the anti-Semitism of white neo-Nazis, but justify Islamist anti-Semites who actually murder Jews in Copenhagen and Paris.

But it is only paradoxical insofar as it fails to grasp the underlying paradigm. As Chris Manby points out, there is a hierarchy of oppression, in which rich white people are at the top and, essentially deserve what’s coming to them, the bastards. Within that paradigm, pace our late friend political Communism, anyone who is with us against the lifestyles and ideology of rich white people is ipso facto on the side of the light. However fond they may be of enslaving prepubescent girls for sex or throwing gay people off buildings. It’s perfectly logical, and morally contemptible.

Not long ago, a relative of mine asked to see me and my husband to discuss ‘a concern’. Somewhat bemused, we agreed; it transpired that what he wanted to raise with us was his worries about what he perceived to be our excessive consumption of alcohol while trying to conceive a child. In essence his message was that we should stop drinking or the result would be a child with behavioural problems and/or special needs.

His concern was, he told us, born of his ‘studies in biology’. He came armed with helpful print-outs of articles from the internet, one for me and one for my husband. He even had notes about ‘the science’.

Never mind the accuracy of his perception that either of us is a raving alcoholic (we’re not) or indeed the validity of the ‘science’ he wanted to share with us (debatable) or indeed the appropriateness of a not particularly close family member attempting an intervention in such a profoundly intimate area of our married life (extremely debatable). The point of relating this distasteful episode in our family life is to exemplify a general trend that has only become apparent to me since notions of parenthood appeared on my radar: namely the co-option of ‘science’ to deliver what are, essentially, moral precepts.

Two things collide here. The first is the general injunction in modern society to avoid being ‘judgemental’, for fear of the cruelties this will supposedly inflict on anyone experiencing moral censure. (Theodore Dalrymple writes beautifully on this subject here, arguing in essence that while the backlash against moral censure is in some ways a justified reaction against past cruelties, determined refusal to apply moral judgement to individuals can result in far worse cruelties especially when institutionalised in the mechanisms of the social state.)

The second is the ebbing away of any source of authority except science. Religions are increasingly perceived as sources less of moral authority than of bigotry; received opinion is ignorant until proven enlightened; we no longer listen to what our mothers told us about childrearing, preferring to rely on ‘guidelines’ issued by bodies such as the WHO. This is by no means confined to child-rearing but assumes particular force when applied to the sensitive subjects of bringing new humans into the world and their subsequent nurture.

The result is a situation in which moral precepts (women should not drink, at all) piggyback on sensible advice (don’t neck a bottle of vodka a day while pregnant or it will harm your baby) and are delivered in a supposedly ‘non-judgemental’ way via ‘scientific’ studies of dubious validity. The advice they offer is that because it cannot be proven that any level of alcohol consumption in or around pregnancy is 100% safe, it should be avoided entirely. The fact that the same could be said of any number of substances is neither here nor there; the motivation for choosing to focus on alcohol is obscured and the finger-wagging can proceed.

If science is turned into a moralising project, its ability to develop human knowledge will be compromised. It will also distract people from developing a properly moral understanding of the problems that face humanity in the twenty-first century. Those who insist on treating science as a new form of revealed truth should remember Pascal’s words: ‘We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.’

It is no surprise that this is evident nowhere more than in discourses around childrearing: all societies feel, justifiably, that they have a vested interest in the processes whereby new members are created and socialised. No area straddles the public and private sphere more delicately. There can surely be few areas where taking a moral stance is more understandable, and the obfuscation of such stances behind pseudoscience is disingenuous at best, if not downright destructive both to meaningful science but also to our shared understanding of right and wrong.

With all this in mind I would have preferred my relative to come right out with the moral stance. I would have disabused him of his mistaken perception of my lifestyle and all would have been well. As it is, the cloaking of morality in science has left an uneasy sense of a misperception impossible to rectify because cloaked, an insulting criticism impossible to challenge because disavowed, and an unhappy rift in my family circle.